Recently, services like CD Baby, Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud and Apple's iTunes are helping make popular the idea that musical style is an almost purely personal experience, no longer defining mass markets but much smaller social groups that often form online, physically disconnected.

The title "w00t" was once a popular Internet discussion group interjection, particularly in online multiplayer video games -- a geekier version of a big smiley face. Some say it was shorthand for "woo-hoo! Loot!" when players found treasure in those games.

The image is entirely appropriate here since the music of "w00t" is built entirely from samples of audio from video games, including Super Mario Smash Brothers,Warcraft,Halo and more than a dozen others.

"As a performer, I had become interested in video game pads," Ostertag told me. "There's a lot of R&D that went into game pads. They emerged out of a lot of trial and error and the result is a device that's very intuitive to manipulate."

Ostertag found he could use $29 game pads as an instrument to trigger any kinds of samples he chose -- musical tones or any other recorded sounds.

"So then, I thought, I have my game pad, what kind of piece am I going to write for it? So that's how 'w00t' came about."

Here's a snippet. The style may be strange to most readers -- but that's the point. This isn't pop or "commercial" music that could sell millions of copies. It's a more personal art form. Ostertag uses technology both to create the music and to reach his audience of listeners scattered around the world.

Shards of sounds are recombined here to create original musical phrases -- more like a mosaic than a collage. The features of the sampled sounds are recognizable, even as the sounds are turned from their intended purpose -- elevated, the way words are elevated into poetry.